Project Build Status

Windows Terminal v1.0 Roadmap

The plan for delivering Windows Terminal v1.0 is described here, and will be updated as the project proceeds.

Terminal & Console Overview

Please take a few minutes to review the overview below before diving into the code:

Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is a new, modern, feature-rich, productive terminal application for command-line users. It includes many of the features most frequently requested by the Windows command-line community including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming & styling, and more.

The Terminal will also need to meet our goals and measures to ensure it remains fast and efficient, and doesn't consume vast amounts of memory or power.

The Windows Console Host

The Windows Console host, conhost.exe, is Windows' original command-line user experience. It also hosts Windows' command-line infrastructure and the Windows Console API server, input engine, rendering engine, user preferences, etc. The console host code in this repository is the actual source from which the conhost.exe in Windows itself is built.

However, because Windows Console's primary goal is to maintain backward compatibility, we have been unable to add many of the features the community (and the team) have been wanting for the last several years including tabs, unicode text, and emoji.

Shared Components

While overhauling Windows Console, we modernized its codebase considerably, cleanly separating logical entities into modules and classes, introduced some key extensibility points, replaced several old, home-grown collections and containers with safer, more efficient STL containers, and made the code simpler and safer by using Microsoft's Windows Implementation Libraries - WIL.

This overhaul resulted in several of Console's key components being available for re-use in any terminal implementation on Windows. These components include a new DirectWrite-based text layout and rendering engine, a text buffer capable of storing both UTF-16 and UTF-8, a VT parser/emitter, and more.

Creating the new Windows Terminal

When we started planning the new Windows Terminal application, we explored and evaluated several approaches and technology stacks. We ultimately decided that our goals would be best met by continuing our investment in our C++ codebase, which would allow us to reuse several of the aforementioned modernized components in both the existing Console and the new Terminal. Further, we realized that this would allow us to build much of the Terminal's core itself as a reusable UI control that others can incorporate into their own applications.

The result of this work is contained within this repo and delivered as the Windows Terminal application you can download from the Microsoft Store, or directly from this repo's releases.

Resources

For more information about Windows Terminal, you may find some of these resources useful and interesting:

FAQ

I built and ran the new Terminal, but it looks just like the old console

Cause: You're launching the incorrect solution in Visual Studio.

Solution: Make sure you're building & deploying the CascadiaPackage project in Visual Studio.

⚠ Note: OpenConsole.exe is just a locally-built conhost.exe, the classic Windows Console that hosts Windows' command-line infrastructure. OpenConsole is used by Windows Terminal to connect to and communicate with command-line applications (via ConPty).

Documentation

All project documentation is located in the ./doc folder. If you would like to contribute to the documentation, please submit a pull request.

Contributing

We are excited to work alongside you, our amazing community, to build and enhance Windows Terminal!

BEFORE you start work on a feature/fix, please read & follow our Contributor's Guide to help avoid any wasted or duplicate effort.

Communicating with the Team

The easiest way to communicate with the team is via GitHub issues.

Please file new issues, feature requests and suggestions, but DO search for similar open/closed pre-existing issues before creating a new issue.

If you would like to ask a question that you feel doesn't warrant an issue (yet), please reach out to us via Twitter: